Michigan Secretary of State/U.S. Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land (R) unleashed this slab of folky flatugasma about the gender pay gap in 2010: "Well we all like to be paid more and that's great but the reality is that women have a different lifestyle. They have kids, they have to take them to get dentist appointments, doctors' appointments, all those kinds of things, and they're more interested in flexibility in a job than pay." None of which even addresses why women should be paid less than men to do those jobs! Also, too, men have kids.
Citizens for Tax Justice looks at Rep. Dave Camp's tax reform bill, and finds it wanting. You know the drill -- rich folks and corporations pay less, working families pay more, which Mr. Camp claims that won't be the case, but just like the rest of them, won't explain how. There's a reason he can't explain: a lot of Mr. Camp's revenue-raisers are either gimmicks (like the one-time tax on offshore profits, which still won't get repatriated and taxed properly) or get phased out after ten years. I guess he's not too worried about any of that, since he'll be out of Congress by then.
President Obama delays scheduled payment reductions from Medicare to private competitors like Medicare Advantage for the second year in a row. So when Republicans run their eight bajillion ZOMG OBAMACARE CUTZ TEH MEDICAREZ BY $500 BILLYUNZ!!!! ads again, Democrats will be ready with..."well, we stopped Obamacare from doing that for another year or so"? Again with the 13-dimensional chess! Democrats need to take this head-on, by reminding Americans that Medicare has no obligation to give handouts to its competitors, and the fewer handouts Medicare gives to private insurers, the better Medicare works.
If you turn on the evening news and start hearing about this "coalition" called Reforming America's Taxes Equitably, the Center for Effective Government tells you who they are. Long story short: they're a coalition of big corporations trying to get Congress to cut corporate taxes. Strangely, though, eight of the corporations in this coalition received over $100 billion in federal contracts in 2013, and if they succeed in cutting corporate taxes, they won't be able to suck at the big gummint teat as much, right? Just kidding; Congress will just cut food stamps again if it comes to that.
Mother Jones finds video from 2009 of Rand Paul suggesting that Dick Cheney started the Iraq war to enrich his cronies at Halliburton. If you're saying what took him so long to figure out what I figured out in October of 2002?, recall that the video dates from 2009. And if you're wondering why this anti-war streak, one that honors his family and his country, hasn't resulted in very much action from now-Senator Rand Paul, recall that this video dates from 2009.
Finally, because it bears repeating, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the poor spend considerably more of their money on necessities than much wealthier folks do. The lowest 20 percent of income earners spend about 60% of their income on essentials like rent or mortgage, health care, utilities, and home-cooked food; the highest 20% spend, on average, 45% of their money on similar items. All that seems fairly commonsensical, but if your right-wing uncle cries WHAT ABOUT TEH OTHUR 40%!!!!!!!, remind him that nobody, including him, has ever been so disciplined that they don't spend on leisure -- though poor folks also do that less than rich folks do.
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